[EM] Majority Criterion, hidden contradictions

[Michael Poole]

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax writes:

[snip]
> Now, it does appear to me that the people who have explained the MC in
> the past have been to some extent aware of the problem, which is why
> we get vague language like "if the voters are asked which candidate
> they prefer over all the others," "Asked?" How? It must be on the
> ballot, and it must be through a method of expressing such strict
> preference that the ballot allows. Approval allows such expression. In
> only one way. Exactly the same as in Plurality.
[snip]

Coming from someone who recently advocated in favor of exit polls as a
way of measuring actual voter preference, this insistence on looking
only at ballot markings is extremely strange.  The winner contemplated
under MC has never been, and should not be, defined by what the ballot
allows a voter to express.

As an extreme case, in an election for president with three
candidates, if the ballots only have one checkbox, and the name of
George W. Bush next to it, does that make Bush the majority winner?

A lot of your other claims are wrong -- for example, claiming that I
make a "very important and false assumption" about a secondary
election that I neither considered nor discussed -- but most of them
boil down to the issue of whether election criteria should be judged
based on objectively obtainable information or on what the ballots
actually capture.

Michael Poole